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The French want to tell the world that the #MeToo movement is attacking sexual freedom. At least that’s what a group of more than 100 “prominent French women,” from the industry and beyond, are saying, making the argument that “clumsy flirting” is not “macho aggression.” Writer/clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Sarah Chiche wrote the text that was signed on by many prominent women from Catherine Deneuve to Catherine Robbe-Grillet.

Continue reading Catherine Deneuve & More Slam Post-Weinstein Witch Hunt And #MeToo Movement at The Playlist.

Sweden’s national broadcaster is lining up a host of docs that could garner international appeal.

Svt, Sweden’s national broadcaster, has documentary slots that would be the envy of many other countries.

The K Special arts and culture prime-time documentary strand alone has 52 slots per year. There are a further 40 music-related documentaries shown on the channel each year.

Emelie Persson, who has worked at Svt for the past 17 years, and as commissioning editor for Svt for the past six years, has worked on releasing films including Oscar-winner Searching For Sugarman, local hit A Thousand Pieces, as well as An Honest Liar and Pixadores.

“As a public service channel, you have to give audiences something else other than entertainment shows,” Persson told ScreenDaily.

Of the 52 K Special projects per year, around six or seven each year are in-house productions, while another 15 tend to be Swedish productions or co-productions, with the rest international acquisition (usually pre-buys).

Searching For Sugarman...

Amy Schumer and Bill Hader in TrainwreckPhoto: Universal Pictures With Sundance just wrapping up and Berlin starting up in a few days, we are now immersed in the year-long barrage of film festivals. One such festival in South By Southwest. A few weeks back they announced the first seven films of their program, including the opening night film Brand: A Second Coming. Today, they have revealed the rest of the features to be shown in March (except for the midnight program), and some of it has me very excited. The bigger titles announced do not do much for me. Paul Feig's Spy, starring Melissa McCarthy, and the Will Ferrell/Kevin Hart starrer Get Hard leave a lot to be desired in terms of anticipation, as does a work in progress cut of Judd Apatow's latest film Trainwreck. I'm guessing an Apatow work in progress is probably around three and a half hours.

South by Southwest, the multi-faceted film, music and technology festival held annually in Austin, TX will feature such upcoming films as Paul Feig’s Spy, David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, and Ondi Timoner’s Russell Brand profile Brand: A Second Coming as headliners in this year’s film festival lineup.

SXSW runs from March 13 to 21 in Austin and is now in its 22nd year. Variety has details of the 145 films and 100 world premieres bowing at this year’s festival. Brand, as previously reported, will be the festival’s opening night film.

Other notable titles on the list are the Will Ferrell/Kevin Hart comedy Get Hard, a rough cut of Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck, the directorial debut of 28 Days Later screenwriter Alex Garland, Ex Machina, and a new comedy by Michael Showalter, Hello, My Name is Doris.

On the small screen,...

Accompanying the first track of the anticipated collaboration, Soused, between avant-garde crooner Scott Walker and sludgy noisemeisters Sunn O))) is an arresting short film by French director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne. Walker’s music — with or without Sunn O))) — is the stuff of waking nightmares, and Vienne’s dream-like film matches it fuzzed-out chord by fuzzed-out chord. A house in the mountains, a blonde-tressed woman moving in slow-motion epilepsy; a teenage boy (her son?) locked in tremulous horror; a car crash?; and a sudden appearance by French novelist, theater artist and dominatrix Catherine Robbe-Grillet… it’s eerie, disquieting, and, with its […]...

Accompanying the first track of the anticipated collaboration, Soused, between avant-garde crooner Scott Walker and sludgy noisemeisters Sunn O))) is an arresting short film by French director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne. Walker’s music — with or without Sunn O))) — is the stuff of waking nightmares, and Vienne’s dream-like film matches it fuzzed-out chord by fuzzed-out chord. A house in the mountains, a blonde-tressed woman moving in slow-motion epilepsy; a teenage boy (her son?) locked in tremulous horror; a car crash?; and a sudden appearance by French novelist, theater artist and dominatrix Catherine Robbe-Grillet… it’s eerie, disquieting, and, with its […]...

L’immortelle

Written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet

France, 1963

Just by examining the title, L’immortelle appears to be the quintessential Alain Robbe-Grillet film. It’s French, it’s feminine (that is, it’s being used to describe a woman), and it translates to “The Immortal”, a reference to how often the woman appears posthumously thanks to its unique narrative structure. Robbe-Grillet is primarily known as a writer, and known in the film world for having penned Resnais’s equally immortal Last Year at Marienbad just 2 years before this feature. The sudden explosion of discussion for Marienbad quickly made it synonymous with French arthouse flair. It was difficult yet rewarding; beautiful yet quietly violent. His hand in Marienbad is immediately evident in L’immortelle, even down to Resnais’s influence in spending half the film covering the surrounding architecture. Despite exclusion from discussion of those involved with the nouvelle vague...

The world is all out of whack: multiple Dutch tilts are on display in Voyage sans espoir (1943), an unbelievably glossy poetic realist proto-noir from Christian-Jaque: the film actually begins with railway tracks viewed from the front of a speeding train, upside down, as the camera drunkenly rolls upright and titles come flying towards us, slapping flat across the frame like flies hitting a windshield.

The plot is convoluted but crisp—chance encounters tie together Jean Marais, fleeing his job at a bank to see life and settle in Argentina, with an escaped jailbird of psychopathic demeanor (Paul Bernard) and his girlfriend, the radiant Simone Renant. There's also a likably crooked ship's captain carrying a torch for Renant, a sinister ethnic-type sailor (Ky Duyen), and a pair of hard-drinking but eternally sober detectives who resemble nothing more than the Thompson Twins from Tintin. The French had a nifty way with...

New York. The Last Modernist: The Complete Works of Béla Tarr opens today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs through Wednesday, and R Emmet Sweeney has a wide-ranging talk with the retired filmmaker. "Whether or not The Turin Horse turns out to be Béla Tarr's last film, as the gnostic, gnomic Hungarian master has claimed it will be, the sense of finality is absolute," writes the L's Mark Asch. Aaron Cutler for Moving Image Source: "Primo Levi writes in Survival in Auschwitz that the lowest point a human can reach is when he or she is forced to act without choice, performing tasks purely for his or her own survival. Freedom of choice is what separates humans from other animals. The Tarr crew (which, beginning with him and partner, Ágnes Hranitzky, has gone on to include a regular screenwriter [László Krasznahorkai], composer [Mihály Vig], and cinematographer [Fred Kelemen]) began by comparing humans to each other,...

About ten years ago, when I was the editor of the Home Guide section of Premiere magazine, I was looking into expanding the scope of that back-of-the-book section's DVD coverage, and including more obscure exploitation stuff in there. So I had this new DVD of a 1975 Radley Metzger film I had not seen before, a filmed-in-Paris adaptation of a pseudonymous novel by Catherine Robbe-Grillet, called The Image, starring the very attractive Mary Mendum as the young sex slave of this older broad played by Marilyn Roberts who gets involved in some sort of triangle with this dude...well, anyway, the whole thing was all very well done in the Metzger softcore mode, lotsa pretty shots and location work and goofy dialogue, as dialogue involving slaves and training in the erotic realms always tends to be. And then, smack dab in the middle of the film, a scene in which Mendum's...